Over the last few years in particular, the capabilities of the Internet have grown dramatically, with the introduction of new protocols (i.e., XML), advanced browsers, electronic commerce capabilities, and other features.
Numerous commercial enterprises are now attempting to somehow profit through this new infrastructure, in many cases by providing services that attach a smaller incremental monetary value to a particular transaction.
One such type of capability is the pay-per-click search engine popularized by Google and other companies. In accordance with such a capability, a user goes to a website, and inputs the name of goods or services that they would like the pay-per-click company to find. Various providers of goods and services register their websites with the company, and these are provided to the user in a list which is prioritized by the level of compensation which the merchant will give the pay-per-click company if the user is routed to their site. For example, using such a system, if a user types in “binoculars,” the pay-per-click system might return five potential links, with the most prominent one being associated with that supplier of binoculars which will compensate for a penny or a few cents more than the links presented below.
One problem with existing systems is that a user may cause an undesirable level of expenditure on the part of the merchant by overclicking on a particular link. In some cases, it has been known that some users have done this simply for the purpose of undermining a particular provider or competitor. Since the existing systems have no way of knowing whether a link through is legitimate or bogus, the provider of the goods/services winds up having to pay the pay-per-click provider excess sums, with the fraudulent perpetrator remaining unreprimanded.